


Time Waits For No One

by AlienStarlight



Category: Epilogue - Fandom, Homestuck
Genre: Abandonment, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Epilogue, F/M, Gen, Out of Character, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Self-Indulgent, Self-Reflection, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 12:33:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18699700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlienStarlight/pseuds/AlienStarlight
Summary: Jade stops the search for a missing Dave to meet one Sollux Captor, whose "eyewitness" account forces her to confront the truth and her biggest fears. While she's at it, might as well pull the snarky troll guy along for the ride, right? (Alternatively, Jade and Sollux find solace in the unlikeliest place: each other.)--I just finished reading the HS Epilogue (I started with Candy, which I detest, and ended with Meat). I have a lot of feelings about Everything. But mostly, I wish I could make both Jade and Sollux happy, because they. Deserve. Better.--Tagged OOC just in case. I always try to stay in character even in unlikely scenarios.Anyway, this was mostly therapy for me and my love for these two idiots.





	Time Waits For No One

**Author's Note:**

> Dave(bot) jets off without a word to his doggy wife, after realizing a whole bunch of stuff that involved said wife? Not cool, man. 
> 
> Aradia, not to rain on the corpse parade, but just maybe take a minute to let Sollux know you're cutting him loose? No? Well alright then. 
> 
> Author isn't mad at all, nope. Anyway, I hope someone enjoys reading this as much as I did writing it.

It took her nearly two months of searching, one whole month focused on that border between the Human and Troll Kingdoms, the next zipping between spies and known war generals. Rose, John and even Roxy helped in their own ways, and Jake found the time to pry himself away from hiding with his beloved son. Fascist Jane was not someone she could just drop by to visit, not since Jade had defected to Karkat's Revolution. She had a hunch that Jane already knew, though. After all, she'd sounded the alarm throughout the kingdoms with all her remaining human friends after both she and Karkat were certain that try as they might, they just couldn't find Dave Fucking Strider. 

It had left her heartbroken, grasping, breathless from the gaping hole he left behind. The suddenness, the mystery surrounding his disappearance. There was no explanation, no body, and even though she knew this was War, this was a reality that many before her had faced in perished worlds (and many after her would, as even now families grieved lost ones) she couldn't bring herself to accept it. Dave was a god, they'd fought battles for existence together. 

Then, _he'd_ finally reached her. 

A spy carrying a missive from the Carapace Kingdom, inviting her to a meeting with some troll who claimed to know what happened to her husband. Of course, she'd decided it was probably some sort of weird trick, but nothing was above her search at that point. So she donned the first piece of clothing she wore in weeks that wasn't black- a lovely green dress with a floaty skirt, one that Dave had said matched her eyes. Her silk black stockings and iconic red shoes, with a pitch jacket over it all. 

The second she set eyes on his sightless ones, she knew. It was no trick. He may not have looked like much, but still the distant memory stirred: the yellow symbol, the ghosts that resembled him, the almost ridiculously accurate description Karkat used to spew repeatedly aeons ago. 

What was his name again? Oh. Sollux... Captor. A live, young Sollux Captor. He was the only one at his table, with no Dave in sight. 

He just cocked his head up slightly upon her approach in that seedy Carapacian cafe, face still drawn and tight, and licked his lips before emitting a "Hey".

She had broken down. 

To say she had blubbered was an understatement. Captor had gingerly offered a single hand on the shoulder (not before knocking into her head first by accident) as comfort, and strangely it had helped calm her down after a few agonizing minutes. 

"Jegus. I didn't even say anything yet," he complained, and she'd sniffed away the tears to respond with one of her best:

"You said 'hey'".

The look of confusion and then irritation in his face had been enough to bring out a watery chuckle from her. Whatever he had to say, she was ready for it. 

"So uh. I guess I heard about this sad doggess...I mean goddess, who keeps harassing everyone about her lost human husband? Which apparently was Insufferable Shades McDouche?"

"Dave," she'd snapped at him. He'd flinched slightly away from her, and she stopped the low growl that was rumbling within her. "You said you know where he is?"

"Nah," his voice was pretty even, despite his last reaction to her. "I never said I know where they went. I just kinda know what happened. Sort of."

"I'm gonna need you to start making sense now, OK," she leant forward, bracing her arms against the edge of the table eagerly. A Carapacian scuttled over nervously to place two mugs of what looked like hot chocolate on the table, removing the empty one near Sollux's gray hand. 

"Look, lady, I'm blind. I don't really know what went down except for what I could make out. TZ taught me a few things, even if I can't really do what she does. Not all trolls get to smell sight like her."

He must have been talking about- "Terezi?"

"Yeah. Where is she anyway? For all the shitty time we spent on here, I never got to talk to her again about our shared condition. She still looking for Serket?"

"She never came back," Jade responded promptly. She was pretty sure she was the only one among the group anymore who even remembered Terezi with relative ease, not counting the trolls, of course. 

"Well okay I guess," he'd replied, but she could catch the despondency underneath his tone. "Anyway you remember your younger corpse self? The one with a shitty cherub god playing tenant?"

"What," Jade stared at him, noting for the first time how childlike he looked. His features weren't necessarily delicate in any sense of the word, but despite the bags under his wide empty eyes and the faint lines from his slightly big nose to the corners of his thin mouth, the canvas of his youth still peeked through. She thought he was a sight nicer than Karkat had been, at least. 

"Come on, when AA and me first saw you here," he waved impatiently, and she dodged his fingers by mere inches. "The funeral for your other body?"

It all hit her then, and she nodded slowly as the memory of her other self's corpse bolting upright in the coffin replayed in her head. "...yeah."

"Well, we were following her around," he muttered, suddenly losing life in his voice. "AA and me. She was waiting for the Cherub Jade to do something in this grand scheme that would take them back to..."

Harley watched the subtle changes in expression as his words trailed off. Whatever it was, he seemed pained about it. 

"Back to what?"

"...never mind. Doesn't matter anymore I guess, it'll never matter again." Turning his face to the side, he seemed almost to look away from her, except she knew he couldn't see. "Anyway. It happened."

"What did?"

"What AA was waiting for. The last portal out of this shithive world. Back out there, into...into so-called relevance."

A tiny shudder ran down Jade's spine, gone before she could even really register it. 

"Oh. Okay. Well-"

"I'm pretty sure your asshole Time player was there too."

She sucked in a breath, fingers closing around her mug in a way that sent the steam billowing out from the drink. The tiny involuntary display of withering power did not escape Sollux. 

"Dave was- what? Where?"

"Uh," he moved back in his chair and turned slightly to raise his arm, pointing due east. "The tallest Tower in the Carapace Kingdom, pretty much where we were watching Cherub Jade fucking meditating forever."

"What?" The last time she had seen him, it had been on that mission to find Shitty Liberties between the borders of the Human and Troll kingdoms. "When was that?"

"I don't fucking know. Not like we kept track of anything as basic as fuckin time. It was when the sky went shithive maggots and the clouds were hell-shaped."

She remembered that. It had been a fleeting glimpse, almost a fancy in her mind when she gazed at the skies awaiting Dave's return from whatever he had left to check out. 

"....that was the day," she whispered. The troll teenager - twenty-something?- moved closer to keep her within hearing. "The day I lost him."

"Well no shit," he said unsympathetically. "That was when he turned up and stole my fucking girlfriend. Okay, probably an exaggeration," he quickly added as he sensed the immediate change in Jade's demeanour. 

"What the FUCK happened!"

"Okay, okay, so. AA flew up from the tower, right, to talk to Cherub You. She left me on the tower... I may or may not have been having a mood swing. Whatever man."

"And??"

"Jeez.. And that's when everything went fuck all, I guess. The fucking sky split open and Cherub You shot right up into the fucking portal...fuck, I forgot if Strider appeared before that. Well, I heard his stupid voice, so-"

"I thought you were still on the tower?"

"Listen, when you lose one of your senses, you get more of the others," he said dismissively. "Also, I could sorta smell his metal body and red blinkers from where I was."

"Metal?" Jade screeched in confusion. Sollux groaned. 

"Well. He was definitely metal and not that pitiful human smell."

After three minutes during which Jade managed to restrain herself from throttling her informant, bursting into tears again, or just combusting from all her emotions, she sighed. 

"Okay, so...Robot Dave shows up, then what?"

Sollux shrugged. "He and Aradia had a stupid conversation I guess. I don't really remember whatever I managed to catch, mostly it was about the portal and following Cherub You into it."

Jade took another couple of minutes, to process and piece together what the reasons could have been for a robot version of her husband to have left reality as they knew it. If that was even him. 

"Okay..then what??"

"Then they just up and fucking left," he said with a sort of deadpan finality. "Held hands and blasted off like a piece of chutewaste towards the sun."

"Just like that??"

"Yeah." The word was firm, grim. "Just like that."

"Huh. How come you didn't go with them?"

Shrug. "I heard Aradia say she was gonna cut me loose. He pretty much agreed to that, so..."

"You mean Dave?" 

"Yeah." Sollux took a sip from his drink, and Jade noticed through her own painful haze the way that his knuckles paled from the tightness of his hold. 

"...I'm sorry."

He jerked his head upwards to- well, not look at her. Then he laughed bitterly. 

" _You're_ sorry? I just told you your matesprit, who had somehow transformed into a fucking Striderbot, had shot off into space...and you're sorry?"

It was Jade's turn to shrug. 

"IDK, I guess it was kind of awful for your troll girlfriend to take off like that and leave you behind."

"Yeah." He was quiet for a moment. "Well, we had a complicated history and I guess she wasn't really my girlfriend. I mean, she never really said that? I just assumed...from other things she said-"

"To assume is to put an ass between u and me," Jade chirped, strangely feeling much lighter than before. The resounding silence and utter confusion on her companion's face made her laugh. "I guess what I mean is Time players are all about solid stuff. Things that they take as set in stone, unalterable."

"...Yeah." He said in a low voice. "I get you."

They spent a small stretch of their own time, then, contemplating the exchange they'd just had, pondering where their respective Time players had gone, whether or not it was worth saying anything further to each other. They hadn't even known each other during the game, and now they were separated by age and causal reality differentiation bullshit. 

Jade decided that perhaps this depressing excuse for a troll needed the companionship. 

"I don't know if this makes sense to you. Since you're technically not from here and young and...well," she thought about it all, her preoccupation with Dave since day one, Karkat's involvement, or rather her involvement in whatever had been developing there. The break, the eruption of the war, her marriage to Dave, the way his affectionate looks into her soul seemed to cut off as if he couldn't bring himself to gaze for too long. 

"You gonna finish that thought?"

She smiled sadly, and though he couldn't see it, she suspected he could pick up on her immediate feelings. "You ever get the gist that, even if you want something so hard, so much that your own heart could break for it, it's just not meant for you? Ever, in any reality, no matter what you do?"

She could've stopped to consider that she was having this conversation, an adult god like her, with a half-dead teenage troll boy whom she'd never officially met face-to-face the way she had with Karkat. But Jade Harley was beyond giving a damn, now. 

"I dunno," he replied uncertainly. "Not sure if I ever really wanted anything for real... Let alone that badly."

His face dropped as he said it, and although his blank eyes glimmered, it was her face that felt the falling of moisture. _That badly._

"Oh," her voice was low and hard and stable despite the razor edges of truthful introspection within her chest. 

"I. I guess... I did want something. A lot of things." He gasped out as if it physically hurt to say out loud, and his tears fell too. "I wanted a better Alternia. I wanted my stupid fucking friends to live. I wanted...wanted to not have been the reason for AA-"

Jade didn't really know why he'd raised his arm to stifle his voice, but she'd assumed it was just regrets over his ex not-girlfriend. She scooted closer and rested an arm comfortingly around his surprisingly skinny frame. 

"Sorry," he muttered thickly, "-such a loser-"

"No, you're not," she murmured. He moved into her half-hug. 

"I guess I just wanted us to win the fucking game. I- I wanted to not care anymore, to not fucking feel or give a shit about exploding bots and demons and- I wanted FF to not have gotten fucking murdered." He sounded pissed off now, as if an anger was rearing itself up after forced sleep. "I wanted it to just stop."

Jade nodded, hand squeezing his shoulder. She had no idea what he had gone through, but even if it was probably similar to her experience of the game, it clearly was still fresh for him while she'd resolved her issues decades ago.

"That's why I left with AA, I guess. I mean, she had plans and shit but... I don't know. Sometimes it feels like I did it for the dumb reasons."

"All reasons are really good reasons," Jade tried to console him. "Even if they seem selfish, they ultimately outgrow your original intent."

"I don't know what that fucking means." Sollux cleared his throat, closing his unseeing eyes. "But okay."

"I'm sorry," Jade said sincerely. "It seems you did have a lot of things you really wanted and maybe needed. All I can say is that I'm glad you're here anyway, and-"

Jade suddenly thought about several recent moments she'd shared with certain people: bickering over strategy with Karkat, watching Kanaya and Rose lovingly scolding their rebellious daughter, getting hugged by Harry Anderson and then immediately by John, Roxy's sympathetic hand squeezing hers, Jake pulling her in for a crushing hug and then dragging young Tavros into it. 

"And." She pulled Sollux into a full hug, and he let out a sound that sounded too much like a squeak. "And there will be new things that you'll want. Things that you won't have to break your heart for. That you'll get."

It took a minute but the younger troll finally relaxed into the embrace, and when Jade pulled away he smiled for the first time. 

"I mean, probably not," his voice was surprisingly steady and extremely skeptical. "But sure, let's pretend I can even bring myself to ever give a fuck again."

"You can try, young man," Jade grinned, making him groan. 

"Sollux. Please just call me Sollux."

"Nice to meet you, Sollux. I'm Jade."

"I _know_ , for fucks sake," he sighed, and Jade had the feeling he would have rolled his eyes If he still had them.

"Mind your manners," she cuffed him lightly on the arm. "....And, thank you, Sollux. For meeting me here and telling me about... About Dave."

His face fell, and for a moment she wasn't sure why until he spoke. 

"Oh shit. Did we really just have a feelings jam about my dumbass issues when you found out you lost your matesprit forever? Fuck, I really am the fucking worst-"

Jade let out a breath, trying to shake off the sudden cold that seized her at his words. She tried to smile. 

"Don't worry about it, I was the one who brought it-"

"Nah, man." To her surprise, he moved her hand away to put his arm gingerly around her shoulders instead. Something about his awkwardness rang a dozen bells within her, and she tensed up without understanding who he was reminding her of. "I'm sorry, I'm bad at this bullshit but you should probably talk it out so that you process it better? Or maybe that might make things worse, fuck-"

"What's to talk about? The love of my life became a robot and flew off from everything we ever built together!" Her bright, cheery tone reminded her of old Earth horror movies for some reason. "...You're sure it was him, right?"

Sollux nodded. "Positive. His voice was older than I'd ever heard it but yeah it was Strider."

Her heart sank, if possible, even lower. "Oh. Yeah..."

Whether Jade really wanted to admit it, her reality with Dave had always seemed...too good to be true, somewhere in the back of her mind. A sky in which she'd magicked the stars to uncross themselves in favour of a union between them. Maybe that's why she couldn't just let him go, even in the midst of this lasting feud on the planet. But maybe... Maybe it was time she finally faced up to the fact that she really was meant to be alone. 

"I'm sorry," the Gemini troll muttered, and Jade realized she was crying again, on the verge of outright sobbing. Burying her face in her hands, she felt him pat her head hesitantly, carefully avoiding her drooping dog ears. 

"He's gone," she wailed, and he held her tighter despite his inhibitions. 

"He's- fucking- gone!"

"To be fair...he looked like he kinda had to go? Or thought he did-"

"He's- he just left- left me here!"

"Yeah, sucks for him," Sollux was patting her back now. "I mean if I had a hot human-barkbeast matesprit, I wouldn't be going anywhere."

That made her choke on her next sob, a sudden laugh drowned. 

"Sorry," he offered, patting her back again. 

"It's... It's fine," she sniffled, wiping at her eyes. The black jacket was doubling as tissue for her secretions of grief. Oh well. 

"Did... Did you really not want anything else as badly as...well, Strider?" Whether there was dubiousness under his genuine question, Jade decided not to address it. 

"Well," she sighed. "Maybe. I just really wanted him a lot. Kind of like how you seemed to want peace of mind."

He stilled so suddenly that she frowned. "....Am I wrong? I mean, that's what I was getting from what you said-"

"No," he breathed, and finally put some distance between them. He was looking at her blindly with wonder. "No, I guess that's pretty much it."

Jade nodded, taking a deep breath and composing herself. She had a lot more to think about and sort through, but she really didn't want to dwell on any of it now. Refocusing on Captor, who was sipping at his drink, she suddenly wondered if any of the old Carapacian clubs were open in the middle of war. Probably, seeing as how mindless partying thrived during times of great tension, loss, and terror. 

"Let's go dancing," she said, making him cough on his drink. "Party the night away, forget the bad shit."

"Are- are you talking to me?"

"Who else, dummy?"

"I'm blind!"

"You seem awfully fixated on that," Jade said pityingly as Sollux gaped. "Good thing you don't need eyes to hear music, right? ...Or do trolls-"

"Alright, alright," Sollux griped, and Jade smirked to herself. "I guess I might as fucking well. Not like I want to spend another thinkpan-numbing series of days hiding in this dude's cellar."

"..........why are-"

"The War?" Sollux snapped irritatedly. "That I don't give two shits about, by the way. Trust KK to whip up a whole lot of shitstorm. Anyway apparently they check for trolls around here, so dude here's hiding me like some sorta saint."

"Oh right," Jade thought about the sense in taking a troll hideaway to a club. Then again, she was Jade fucking Harley. "Please tell me you have something better to wear than...that."

Sollux looked so offended that she sighed before he even responded. 

"Looks like we're going shopping first. Come on, Troll Boy."

Sollux Captor wasn't okay, and he knew it, and that was that. But going out with Earth C's resident Space goddess for a night out partying after informing her about her matesprit's departure actually sounded less boring than the rest of his existence. 

And Jade Harley? She was definitely not okay, and would not be for a while. But with the exit of a certain Cool Dude from the very fabric of their world, came a certain release within her, a relief despite the sorrow. A cosmic thread had snapped, but maybe she might learn to rise above it. In time, maybe she'd make some sort of realization that being one extreme or the other was not as ideal as hitting centre, a place she would only find within the core of her own being. 

Jade's narrative was her own, after all. And so was Captor's, whether he chose to grab onto it or not.  
\--

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah. Nothing great, but I felt better imagining this. I bet Jade and Sollux would be great pals too tbh 
> 
> I can't believe I never thought of this pairing until I wrote this. 
> 
> Anyway feel free to comment your thoughts and feelings about the epilogue and what you hated/loved most. Thanks for reading!


End file.
